


Where You End and I Begin

by cnroth



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Child Abandonment, Divorced parents, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24668524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnroth/pseuds/cnroth
Summary: B’Elanna works on a letter to her father.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 14





	Where You End and I Begin

She only works on the letter after everyone else is asleep.

The lights are off, doors are locked, and her grandfather’s snores drift down the hall. B’Elanna rests her back against the wall behind her bed and stares at the pad in her hands, bold red words on the backlit screen blurring as her mind wanders. She imagines herself saying these things in person, telling her father how right he was about Starfleet people being uppity, self-absorbed hypocrites. How she hates everyone at her Klingon university for being just as arrogant. How her mother’s family drives her crazy.

How angry she still is that he left.

It would feel so good to unleash years of fury and hurt on the man who abandoned her as a child and hasn’t once tried to reconnect. To scream and throw things. To lay it all out—everything that’s gone wrong, all the misery she’s carried on her own. To shame him for what he did and the way he’s neglected her since.

She imagines him apologizing, falling to his knees and begging for forgiveness, tears rolling down his cheeks. He promises to make up for everything, to be the father she deserved—the father she lost.

Could she forgive him? Sometimes she imagines that scenario—an absurd fantasy of her younger, naive self when he stood like a god in her eyes and she still believed things could go back to the way they used to be.

Other nights she imagines laughing at him, hitting him, or simply walking away, because the truth is there’s nothing he could say or do that would make up for what he said back then. What he did. She’d have to be an idiot to invite him into her life.

Yet she rewrites this letter every night.

How can she possibly express the wounds his words carved into her, how his abandonment affected her? But there is still some part of her—some stupid, childish part—that wants her father back. The father she worshipped. The one who spoiled her, who made her feel safe and loved. Not the stranger who said he couldn’t stand living with two Klingons anymore, then left and never came back. 

Besides, it was her own fault. If only she’d behaved better... if only she hadn’t said those horrible things...

B’Elanna slams her head against the wall, then freezes. _Shit_ , she thinks. _Someone could have heard that_. But her grandfather’s snores don’t even pause, and no other sounds come.

 _He doesn’t deserve you_.

The thought cuts in from nowhere, or maybe somewhere deep within. Again, she stares down at the letter. Skims it. Snorts and shakes her head.

Who is she kidding? She’s never going to send the damn thing. Even if she had the courage, he wouldn’t respond. And if he did— _if_ he did—would she have the guts to write back?

 _He doesn’t deserve you_.

Her finger hovers over the _delete_ button. 

She needs him. Needs family that isn’t Klingon. Needs to get the hell away from Qo’nos, away from her mother and grandfather and the pretentious _tlhoqo’Du’_ at school. She hates this fucking place.

The words glare back at her, stark blood red on the black background. All the things she wishes she could say, written and rewritten, never quite right. Never enough.

For so many years, she’s been chained to her father—this man who hasn’t once reached out to her. She tightens that chain herself every night when she picks up this letter. And he doesn’t deserve it.

_He doesn’t deserve you._

Her eyes close. Tongue runs along her teeth. Lungs suck in a breath.

And she taps _delete._


End file.
